How to Save Weeks of Work When Planning New Production Lines

Digital Solutions for Industry

You know the feeling — a supplier sends specs for a new machine and you realize it’s 30 cm too wide for the floor. After two weeks of studying 3D models on a monitor, drawing DWG layouts, taping outlines on the floor, and building cardboard mockups. All just to imagine how the new line would fit.

That’s exactly the problem Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions — makers of Vileda products — decided to solve.

Whenever a new machine arrived at the Czech Freudenberg plant, the process was always the same: engineers got 2D drawings, the team headed to the floor with a tape measure, marked the machine outline with tape, someone built a cardboard mockup, and everyone stood around trying to picture how it would actually look.

The problem? Nobody could properly visualize height. Or whether a forklift could pass. Or how maintenance staff would access the machine. Errors only showed up during installation — and fixes cost time and money.

We knew manufacturing companies were dealing with these problems over and over. When we first met the Freudenberg team, they didn’t know there was a way to walk around a new machine at full scale directly on the shop floor — before ordering it. They hadn’t heard of XR technology for layout planning.

We showed them what’s possible today. And opened a completely new perspective on production planning.

We proposed a solution built on XR technology — specifically Meta Quest 3 headsets and JoinXR software.

The concept is simple: upload a 3D model, put on the headset, and suddenly you’re standing next to a machine that isn’t physically there — but looks like it is. At 1:1 scale. Accurate to centimeters.

The first test took half a day. The team was skeptical — another technology, more training, more complications.

Then they put on the headset.

“This solution is simple — just a few clicks and within minutes I can see the actual machine model right on the production floor. No more guessing from drawings,” said Miroslav Lux, Process Engineer.

Dušan Svítil, General Manager, summed it up: “Honestly, I was surprised by how simple and effective it is — the team picked it up immediately and we now use it regularly.”

• Before: 1–2 weeks to prepare a layout (drawings, tape, mockups, meetings)
• Now: 2 hours in XR
• Before: Estimates and guesswork about dimensions
• Now: 1–5 cm accuracy at real scale
• Before: Video calls and screen sharing with suppliers
• Now: A shared walkthrough around the virtual machine — locally or remotely

What’s next